Goodby, Gerry

Nick Griffin called him a “vicious old Communist and Zionist thug”, which Gerry Gable would have taken as a compliment. In Searchlight, Andy Bell wrote that he leaves behind “successful tradition of anti-fascism led by intelligence and analysis”. The most powerful tribute was written by Steve Silver, once Gable’s successor alongside Nick Lowles. Silver said that Gable was “the most tenacious post-war anti-fascist Britain ever produced”. His piece describes Gable’s willingness to break the law (the 1962 burglary of David Irving’s flat), and also to work within it while courting legislators (leading to the War Crimes Act 1991), his running of moles (most famously Ray Hill), his appeal to groups of young Jews who were hazy perhaps about the left and about Israel but willing to fight antisemites.

Gable could place a story with TV journalists who had a mass audience. Imagine that, regular news pieces exposing the latest crimes of the far right, and think how far the right would need to go these days before any significant outlet would think of reporting them negatively. But, as an outsider who never saw those plans at first hand, I always felt this came at a price, a playing along with what cynical people considered the rules of the game.

I started writing for Searchlight in the mid-90s. As Silver said, Gable wasn’t too fussy about the politics of people he signed up, he needed to know that we would give our time and not waste his, he didn’t mind that I was in the SWP. I wrote pieces for them taking down anti-refugee talking points. I only met Gable a couple of times, and remember just one line of his, which he’d probably told youngsters a hundred times before. “Anti-fascism only ever gets going when it’s too late”, meaning that a few well-aimed blows can derail a movement of hundreds of people. If you wait till anti-fascist ranks are in the thousands, then you’ll get there when the enemy too has grown and they are much harder to weaken.

Gable wasn’t prissy about methods, what mattered to him was getting a job done. That emphasis on results served to conceal a recurring politics. I’ve seen anti-fascists deprecating Gable’s work, calling the young left-wingers who wrote for his magazine (many of whom now have poorly-paid jobs in the unions) “Zionist activists”, as if with that single word you can solve a political problem. Gable was typical of his generation of pre-56 Jewish CPers – the kind of people to whom it was a point of pride that the Soviet Union was the first state to recognize Israel. They saw the latter as simply a Jewish state, no different from Britain or the US. Palestinians didn’t count for much in this reckoning. Others in that generation left the Party as the news filtered around of the antisemitic Doctor’s Plot launched by Stalin. Gable didn’t leave, I suspect because in his view of the world Jews were losing everywhere, including Eastern Europe. If the choice was between a dictatorial future in which the despot killed 6 million, or one in which he murdered only a few dozen people, the latter was worth fighting for, lying for if need be.

I didn’t like the attempts to reinvent Searchlight after 9/11 as an anti-extremist magazine. I didn’t agree with the politics, nor did Gable have any contacts within Islamist circles - the idea produced few friends, stored up enemies. At the time of the UAF-Searchlight split, I argued for détente. I set up a meeting between the two sides, chaired by Paul Mackney of NATFHE, who had known and been a huge admirer of Gable’s mentor, Maurice Ludmer a CP anti-racist and trade unionist in Birmingham. Everyone promised to work together, but the split continued.

There’s absolutely no reason why anyone who has been watching Israel’s war on Gaza should look at that and think there’s any healthy left possible except through resisting the genocide. Israel’s rulers are a part of the global far right – they’re a face of the authoritarian drift, along with the banning of Palestinian Action, the treating of the prisoners as terrorists. Gable didn’t get, didn’t want to understand, any of that.

But you can’t write a good history of anti-fascism in Britain since 1945 without including Searchlight. People shouldn’t pretend he didn’t exist, should treat that whole tradition as somehow apart from us. Anti-fascists in the 1990s read the magazine, were shaped by it, all of us were – AFA, ANL, YRE, ARA – whatever tradition we belonged to.